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International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Current Issue

The Urgency of the Digital

The Urgency of the Digital, Jul 2025

  • Editorial

      • The Urgency of the Digital: The History and the Future of the Islamic Built Environment Today

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00184_2

        This Special Issue of the focuses on the critical and urgent use of digital tools, interfaces, media, and methods for the study, design, documentation, and presentation of Islamic architecture and the built environment. The articles herein tackle this topic by considering the manifold ways that computerized technologies and approaches disrupt – or, conversely, extend – pre-digital as well as analogue architectural and spatial practices. In addressing a range of environments, from the streets of contemporary New York City and the brick-constructed domes of medieval Isfahan to computerized representations of Mecca, the hajj, and mosque architecture, each of the authors reveals how digital applications and tools are, or could be, reshaping views of Muslim societies.

  • Design in Theory Articles

      • The Muslim Metaverse and its Premoderns: Islam in an Expanding Reality

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00172_1

        In February 2022, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs landed in the news when it announced that performing the pilgrimage to Mecca in the Metaverse does not count as a ‘real hajj’. Mixed reactions to this statement notwithstanding, this article argues that, in the Metaverse era, the existence of a visible but immaterial realm is not just avant-garde, post-modern, or, worse, a ‘blameworthy innovation’. Instead, today’s Muslim imaginary worlds draw upon and find echoes in premodern Islamic artworks, objects, and other forms of creative expression. The Metaverse also recalls the so-called ‘realm of similitudes’ () developed in historical Islamic dream thought, the definitional contours and imagistic boundaries of which vary and enlarge over time. Such changes occur not only in the minds of spiritual sojourners, but also through technological innovations. All of these changes converge today to craft immersive worlds that reaffirm a historical past, play with forms in the present, and project poetic visions of what might come next.

    • The Woven Domes of Isfahan: A Digital-Age Investigation of Medieval Iranian Brickwork

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00173_1

      This article presents digital drafting techniques to reveal encoded ratios underlying the eleventh- and twelfth-century brick compositions at the Great Mosque of Isfahan. I use this evidence to argue that the skill of conceptual subitizing (the mental manipulation of quantities) enabled craftspeople to translate and alter designs into varying scales and contexts. A reinforcing process of sustained use and appreciation cemented these designs in the visual repertoire of medieval Isfahan, led to a hierarchy of their use, and opened a path to symbolic interpretations. While a lack of textual commentary on the Great Mosque’s many renovations has hitherto proved a barrier to interpretation, digital modes of processing and interpreting offer insights into areas the written word cannot. This conveys knowledge essential to reevaluating how signification and meaning were constructed in the medieval Islamic world.

    • ‘Muslim Taxi Driver Praying in the Evening in a Street of West Village’: A Stock Image and Its Implications

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00171_1

      This article takes as its point of departure a 2009 stock photograph of a scene on New York City’s West 15th Street, where a taxi driver is observed performing the Islamic ritual of evening prayer. The focus shifts from the practice that transforms the city street into a place of prayer to the data that lurk beneath the surfaces of the digital image, connecting the explicit architecture of religious observance to the implicit networks of time, space, and technology that shape it, and registering the real impact of digital coordinates upon physical space. This approach compares the technologies that inform the orientation of prayer with those devoted to mobile advertising, observed at a moment when the implications of digital tools are becoming newly visible on the streets of New York. It examines the databases that track the movement of the driver, traces the international telecommunications networks that fuel the commercial exploitation of the city’s real estate, sets the geographies of religious observance against those of immigration and surveillance, and concludes by juxtaposing the more ambiguous devotions of the stereotypical contemporary city.

  • Design in Practice Articles

      • A Digital Ottoman Road to Mecca: Time, Distance, and Game Design

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00175_1

        This article will outline project, a digital educational text-based game that depicts the early modern Ottoman journey from Sarajevo to Mecca. The article walks the reader through the thought processes behind the core questions and the challenges confronted in the project. Games and the game design process have much to offer for our understanding of the Islamic built environment, as, unlike a strictly textual medium of analysis, they can allow the student to encounter spaces through the experiential context of time and distance. It is through the context of time and the traversal of digital space that a game can best reshape how both researchers and students imagine the early modern Islamic world and its historic spaces.

    • Virtual Assembly: Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of London’s Oldest Nigerian Mosque and its Community

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00174_1

      This article introduces Virtual Assembly (2023), a research project that explores innovative approaches to creating an experiential digital archive designed to perform and preserve both the tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of London’s oldest Nigerian Muslim community. The project reconstructs the Old Kent Road Mosque, which served the Muslim Association of Nigeria UK (MANUK) from 1993 until its demolition in 2021. Built upon a point cloud scan of the mosque, Virtual Assembly combines digital modelling with co-creative storytelling to empower community-driven archival practices. The article critically examines challenges in the field of digital heritage, including the authenticity of representation, quality of community engagement, and tensions between grassroots participation and top-down decision-making in heritage preservation. Addressing these issues, the project builds upon the arts-based research methodology of ‘site-integrity’ (S-I), developed by the author, Julie Marsh and extends its application to digital spaces. Central to this approach is the question of how communities can leverage digital modelling to convey the complexities of their lived experiences and reclaim cultural narratives within these non-physical contexts. It underscores the project’s contributions to future digital heritage practices, advocating for archives that prioritize ICH as living and emergent rather than static or reductive.

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